“I don’t want you to die,” says the Sovereign Lord. “Turn back and live!” Ezekiel 18:32 NLT

Back in Exodus 34, about the time when God gave Moses the second set of the Ten Commandments, there is a verse where God says, “I do not leave sin unpunished, but I punish the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generations.”  Many of us have heard people talk about “the sins of the fathers.” Often, it’s because of the way the kids were raised.  

If our parents have a “me first” attitude, we will tend to pick up on that. Parents who laugh at the plight of the poor or boast about how they took someone for everything they had, aren’t teaching their children the value of other people. While it’s easy to look angrily at people who place no value on other people, sometimes it isn’t always their fault that they have this dismissive outlook.

There was a video at one point of a boy walking down the street with torn and dirty clothes and shoes where the soles weren’t very well connected to the upper shoe. The other kids he passed made fun of his poverty and he was looking pretty down-hearted. He sits down on a bench next to another boy who is dressed in clean, elegant clothes with shiny shoes. The two boys look at each other and somehow end up trading places. The boy with the poor clothes becomes the rich one while the one with the nice clothes ends up with the torn clothes. About this time, a lady walks up to the bench with a wheelchair, and it turns out that the rich boy couldn’t walk. The boy who looked longingly upon the nice clothes and shiny shoes ended up losing his mobility. The well-dressed boy who had looked longingly at the healthy legs of the poor boy ended up dancing his way down the street, rejoicing in his freedom.

We don’t know why people behave the way they do – why some people honor the dignity of others, and some people dismiss them.  The good thing about this passage in Ezekiel is that each of us will have to answer for our own behavior.  If we pay attention, there’s a good chance that we’ll learn how to make the right decisions when it comes to how we behave. We don’t have to follow the teachings of our parents. We can learn to think for ourselves and to make our own decisions. It isn’t easy but it’s well worth the effort.

Becky Gillette is a former teacher, newspaper reporter, and preacher who seeks to take an original approach to life’s lessons. She is the author of “Jessie’s Corner: Something to Think About,” a collection of articles which she wrote for a weekly newspaper.